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Stupid, Silly Snake

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Submitted by Sunni on Wed, 2007-02-28 08:27. |

There are situations in which it isn’t a good idea to ignore “the rules”, by which I mean those kernels of wisdom that often come after tangling with Mr. Murphy. To wit, the rules for running Linux include: backing up one’s system before making changes; and around here, wait until the weekend before tweaking one’s system.

Well, I ignored them last night.

And of course, the upgrades I installed seriously messed with my install, breaking all kinds of things. With no fallback install to return to, I slogged through the repairs suggested by fsck, which did help a lot. However, my graphics driver situation has been wonky from the beginning, and apparently something there is now thoroughly broken. I am not a goddess of the command line, so my ability to use my machine is severely hampered.

So, instead of transferring my folders to KMail and starting to catch up on my long-neglected email correspondence, I’ll be researching graphic driver fixes. Still, I like my current system much better than Microsoft.

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Y'all can thank the hardware manufacturers...

Submitted by Presto on Wed, 2007-02-28 11:50.

Y'all can thank the hardware manufacturers for most of the hardware problems that occasionally happen with Linux. Since some of them *cough* ATI and NVIDA *cough* won't release specs to the Linux community, the drivers have to be reverse-engineered and that sometimes causes problems.

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Right in one again!

Submitted by Sunni on Wed, 2007-02-28 12:47.

You nailed it yet again, Presto—nVidia has become the bane of my computer existence.

But what I don’t understand is why the upgrades broke my install in the first place ... maybe it was a combination of them plus the fact that I uninstalled a lot of stuff earlier in the day, and didn't restart? But that doesn’t make sense either, since most of what I jettisoned was cruft (games, Beryl and associated packages, etc.) rather than, say, all of Gnome or KDE.

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Kernel update issue?

Submitted by Presto on Wed, 2007-02-28 14:33.

I did some poking around the Ubuntu forums, and found that when you update the kernel, nvidia drivers often get broken. You might have to enter this command at the kernel:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall nvidia-glx

That is if that's the driver you're using. For more info, see this thread and this thread on the ubuntuforums.org site.

Let me know if that works for you.

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Might Be.

Submitted by Sunni on Wed, 2007-02-28 17:00.

Muchas gracias, Presto. I’d forgotten about that breaking drivers issue.

Alas, though, your suggested fix didn’t work. I’m trying some of the other suggestions over there, though; maybe one will work. I guess it’s some consolation that others are having the same problem ... but it doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence if an upgrade can wreak this kind of havoc.

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LOL

Submitted by UpMyKilt on Wed, 2007-02-28 15:45.

Well, don't worry - you had a partner in crime doing the same thing (updating and changing things) which screwed some stuff up for me.

One thing that is always possible with most distros that I know of, is that you CAN reinstall the system - and if you originally partitioned a home directory, the reinstall process will leave the /home directory alone if you tell it too and won't overwrite your personal data.

I am curious though what you might have done that required fsck.

But for future use - you can run fsck with the flag 'y' as in:

fsck -y

which will then fix what it can on it's own automatically - and you don't have to do any "slogging." It will just run through, find the file system errors and assume "yes" and go ahead and fix.

Student Of All, Disciple Of None
http://ianism.com

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I don't know what I did!

Submitted by Sunni on Wed, 2007-02-28 17:05.

I removed a lot of stuff I wasn’t using, then tried to install the upgrade. When I tried to start the machine this morning, all hell broke loose, and fsck commenced automatically (I think).

I also tried a fallback start, but got kernel panics on both of those attempts, so I’m not sure that it’s just a video driver problem.

Thanks for the fsck information — I’ll still read the man page on it, though. :-)

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